Intel has introduced a portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) products for applications across the data centre, cloud, network, edge and PC.

Highlights include the Intel Core Ultra mobile processor family, the first built on Intel 4 process technology and the first to benefit from the company’s largest architectural shift in 40 years. This is said to deliver the firm’s most power-efficient client processor and ushers in the age of the AI PC.

The fifth-generation Xeon processor family has been built with AI acceleration in every core, bringing leaps in AI and overall performance and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).

And at last week’s launch event in New York, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger showed for the first time an Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, due to arrive next year.

“AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product,” Gelsinger said. “Intel is developing the technologies that empower customers to seamlessly integrate and effectively run AI in all their applications, in the cloud and, increasingly, locally at the PC and edge, where data are generated and used. Intel is on a mission to bring AI everywhere through exceptionally engineered platforms, security and support for open ecosystems. Our AI portfolio gets even stronger with today’s launch of Intel Core Ultra ushering in the age of the AI PC and AI-accelerated fifth-generation Xeon for the enterprise.”

Intel Core Ultra features Intel’s first client on-chip AI accelerator – the neural processing unit, or NPU – to enable more power-efficient AI acceleration with 2.5x better power efficiency than the previous generation. Its GPU and CPU are each capable of speeding up AI applications.

As important, Intel is partnering with more than 100 software vendors to bring several hundred AI-boosted applications to the PC market. For consumer and commercial customers, this means a larger and more extensive set of AI-enhanced applications will run great on Intel Core Ultra. For example, content creators working in Adobe Premiere Pro will enjoy 40% better performance.

Core Ultra-based AI PCs are available now from select US retailers for the holiday season. Over the next year, Core Ultra will bring AI to more than 230 designs from laptop and PC makers worldwide.

Compared with the previous generation of Xeon, the fifth-generation processors deliver 21% average performance gain for general compute performance and enable 36% higher average performance per watt across a range of workloads. Those following a typical five-year refresh cycle and upgrading from older generations can reduce their TCO by up to 77%.

Xeon’s built-in AI accelerators, together with optimised software and enhanced telemetry capabilities, enable more manageable and efficient deployments of demanding network and edge workloads for communication service providers, content delivery networks and broad vertical markets, including retail, healthcare and manufacturing.

During the launch, IBM (www.ibm.com) announced that fifth-generation Xeon processors achieved up to 2.7x better query throughput on its Watson X data platform compared with previous-generation Xeon processors during testing. Google Cloud (cloud.google.com), which will deploy the processors next year, noted that Palo Alto Networks (www.paloaltonetworks.com) experienced a two-times performance boost in its threat detection deep-learning models by using built-in acceleration in fourth-generation Xeon through Google Cloud. And indie game studio Gallium Studios (www.galliumstudios.com) turned to Numenta’s AI platform running on Xeon processors to improve inference performance by 6.5x over a GPU-based cloud instance, saving cost and latency in its AI-based game, Proxi.

Both Core Ultra and fifth-generation Xeon could see applications such as a restaurant that guides menu choices based on budget and dietary needs; a manufacturing floor that catches quality and safety issues at the source; an ultrasound that sees what human eyes might miss; and a power grid that manages electricity with careful precision.

These edge computing use cases represent the fastest-growing segment of computing – projected to surge to a $445bn global market by the end of the decade – within which AI is the fastest-growing workload. In that market, edge and client devices are driving 1.4x more demand for inference than the data centre.

In many cases, users will employ a mix of AI. Take Zoom (zoom.us), which runs AI workloads on Intel Core-based client systems and Xeon based-cloud options within its all-in-one communications and collaboration platform to deliver better user experiences and costs. Zoom uses AI to suppress the neighbour’s barking dog and blur a cluttered home office, and to generate a meeting summary and email.

To make AI hardware technologies accessible and easy-to-use, Intel builds optimisations into the AI frameworks developers use such as PyTorch and TensorFlow and offers foundational libraries through OneAPI to make software portable and performant across different types of hardware.

Developer tools, including Intel’s OneAPI and OpenVino toolkit, help developers harness hardware acceleration for AI workloads and quickly build, optimise and deploy AI models across a wide variety of inference targets.

Wrapping up the event, Gelsinger provided an update on Gaudi 3, coming next year. He showed for the first time the next AI accelerator for deep learning and large-scale generative AI models. Intel has seen a rapid expansion of its Gaudi pipeline due to growing and proven performance advantages combined with competitive TCO and pricing. With increasing demand for generative AI, Intel (www.intel.com) expects to capture a larger portion of the accelerator market in 2024 with its suite of AI accelerators led by Gaudi.